I’ve been working on a revision of our book Septic Systems Owner’s Manual for about 2 months, and just finished today. The book ended up being a lot more revised than I had anticipated. Almost a quarter of all North Americans are on septic systems, so it’s a major subject. In following the onsite wastewater field for several years I’ve seen an incredible amount of corruption in the name of “clean water.” Following are a few paragraphs from one of the new chapters in the book. We’re blowing the whistle. The new edition should be out by the end of the year:

“You might say it all started with the Clean Water Act of 1972, when billions of dollars were allocated to clean up America’s water. With all that money floating around, it didn’t take long for some engineers and some regulators to devise a methodology for extracting the maximum amount of grant money available. It was all so easy. First, septic systems are underground and out of sight; low visibility. Second, who could argue with the idea of “clean water?”

So 15-20 years ago, engineers and regulators (some of them) decreed that simple gravity-fed septic systems were inadequate. They tightened up requirements, instituted new regulations, and thus began the new world of overblown, over-expensive septic systems. I got personally involved in a typical such scam in my hometown in 1989, and it was actually out of this experience (fighting against an albatross of plan) that led to this book.

“I considered writing about this situation when this book was first published in 2000. But the amounts of money were so huge, and the schemes so well orchestrated, I didn’t think anyone would believe it. This was corruption completely missed by the media. The sums were huge. No one had an inkling. Well now, almost seven years later, the same things are going on, and more so. In this chapter, we’ll give you the background, the history, and then case studies of small towns caught up in distorted engineering and excessive onsite wastewater disposal costs. In Chapter 10, “The Tale of Two Sewers,” John Hulls describes how two California towns took two very different approaches in dealing with over-inflated wastewater projects. This leads into Chapter 11, “Small Town System Upgrades,” where we describe how a community can take control of its own wastewater destiny and utilize local power in dealing with engineers and regulators.”

-from the revised edition of Septic Systems Owner’s Manual

I just ran across this on boing-boing, my favorite blog:

Commuter Generated Electricity

It was sent in by Lisa Katayama, a writer from San Francisco, California, whose TokyoMango Blog is here.

JR East’s new experiment consists of energy-generators under ticket wickets, a milliwatt-tracking counter, and 700,000 daily commuters. For the next two months, the railway company will be using using the vibrations of human foosteps at Tokyo Station to generate up to 100 milliwatts per second per person that walks through. The idea is to be able to generate enough electricity to power the wickets themselves and their display panels regularly.

Don’t even think about going there and stomping your feet like a maniac to fuck up their results. That wouldn’t be nice.

-Lisa Katayama

Let It Bleed is one of my favorite rock and roll records. Of course it would be: the first track is “Gimme Shelter.” The second track, “Love in Vain,” is a beautiful song. “Well I followed her to the station, with a suit case in my haind…” The other day I was listening to Robert Johnson — The Complete Recordings, Columbia/Legacy C2K64916 — and heard the original (done in two versions) by RJ in the 1930s. Wow! I always thought the Stones wrote it. So I looked at Let It Bleed: “All selections written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.” Hmmm. I wonder what other Stones songs may have been appropriated without credit to the original artist.

The Robert Johnson twin-CD set is stunning. I’ve had it around for a while, but really only HEARD it for the first time the other day as I was driving along the coast. His songs are each perfect, elegant, just the guy and his guitar, Delta blues. His influence is enormous. Eric Clapton called him “the most important blues musician who ever lived.” See the writeup on RJ in Wikipedia, Robert Johnson in Wikipedia

And hey Mick and Keith, how about giving credit where due in reprints of the Let It Bleed. Also back royalties to family or relatives (if they exist) of Robert Johnson.

Stewart Brand used to write highly-distilled gem-like reviews for his Whole Earth Catalog. Below is his concise summary of a talk given by China scholar Orville Schell last week in San Francisco, regarding what’s going on in China right now. It was one of Stewart’s monthly Seminars of Long Term Thinking (SALT) series (see below).

“China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?”

“China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army.

No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.

So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term.

These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.

ROBUST CHINA:

– Peaceful borders in all directions

– Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world, including with societies the US refuses to deal with

– 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty

– Private savings rate of 40 percent (it’s 1 percent in the US)

– 300 million people with cell phones, and the best cell phone service in the world

– A superb freeway system built almost overnight

– New building construction everywhere, and some of it is brilliant

– 150 million people online

– 350,000 engineering graduates a year

– One-third of the world’s direct investment

– Huge trade surplus

– And an economic growth rate of 9 to 12 percent a year! For decades.

but also…

BRITTLE CHINA

– Not much arable land, so a growing dependence on imported food

– Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal, by dirty methods, growing at the rate of 1-2 new coal-fired plants per week

– 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted and rivers are polluted or pumped dry

– Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China; you don’t see the sun any more

– Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes

– Driven by environmental horrors and by widespread corruption, there were 87,000 instances of social unrest last year, going up every year

– The population is aging rapidly, with no pension or welfare, and a broken healthcare system

– The stock markets are grossly manipulated

– Public and official amnesia about historical legacies such as Tiananmen Square in 1989

How can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions don’t really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to focus on and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when there’s a break in that growth? It could come from inside China or from outside (such as a disruption in the US economy).

It’s hard to look at the China boom now without thinking about the Japan boom in the 1970s and ’80s, remembering how everyone knew the Japanese were going to dominate the US and world economy, and we all had to study Japanese methods to learn how to compete. Then that went away, and it hasn’t come back.

The leadership of China is highly aware of the environmental problems and is enlightened and ambitious about green solutions, but that attitude does not yet extend beyond the leadership, and until it does, not much can happen.

That’s China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly unresolved.

–Stewart Brand

****

Before the lecture, Stewart wrote:

China is the hinge of history these decades. It is huge, and old, now globally engaged, and it moves fast when it wants to.

Lifelong China scholar Orville Schell routinely travels there. His wife Baifang is deeply involved in contemporary Beijing. Schell’s role as dean of the School of Journalism at Cal gives him exceptional insight on what the media and Washington policy-makers have missed in thinking about what China may do in the coming years and decades, and how, and why…

****

For future seminar announcements and Stewart’s summaries by email go to https://list.longnow.org/mailman/listinfo/SALT

I came into San Francisco early this morning. At Caffe Roma (in North Beach), my friend Rod Freebairn-Smith brought his Mac laptop to where I was sitting and turned on a 240-photo slide show for me, of this year’s Burning Man. It was spectacular. It captured the event, the people, and the constructions way better than anything I’ve seen.

I just downloaded some photos from my pocket (Olympus Stylus 800) camera here in the cafe. Here are a few random shots:

San Pedro cactus blooming this week in our garden. A heavenly scent fills the air as night approaches. Bees are all over the blossoms during the day.

Restored caboose I shot last night in Duncan Mills along the Russian River

Caboose interior

Tough road warrior van photographed early this morning on a steep street in North Beach. It was a Ford Triton V-8, looked like 4-wheel drive, a serious vehicle